Meandering Around the World

Notes to self re. our practice run

Vincent lost his wallet containing all his credit cards and, more importantly, his green card on the london underground. We learned a) we should not be carrying the same cards since when he canceled his, my debit card still worked and b) that he (and I) should only carry one card with us with our daily cash. This is something we both knew perfectly well but just hadn’t bothered doing. Ah well.

The kids have been amazingly good in the car. Yesterday we were driving for a grand total of ten hours, admittedly with about four hours of stops but still, there was no squabbling or fussing at all. Poor Miriam regularly gets car sick but she just handles it with a bag and paper towels, no fuss at all. We actually use the travel time as our down time, the kids can read, do their math packet or watch movies on their Itouches, I knit or read and Vincent listens to music while driving. And we actually all chat! So I’m slightly less worried about all those 4 or 5 hours drives people have warned us about (especially in Bhutan!). The reason we were in the car all day yesterday was because we were driving around the Ring of Kerry. We were told it would take from two to four hours to do the whole thing. Another lesson learned – either we travel very slowly or people wildly exaggerate! Admittedly, we did stop for an hour and a half to have a picnic on the beach. While there we made a beehive house in imitation of the primitive stone dwellings that the earliest inhabitants lived in, They are made out of the flat stones that are everywhere here, including the beach. They would just pile stones up like an igloo but so perfectly that they didn’t need any mortar or concrete and it kept the rain out completely. A valuable lesson in how road schooling can be fun! (i.e. note to mom – less on the dragging around monuments and more on the spontaneous creativity)

As far as homework goes, surprisingly David Evan has done a lot of reading, dipping into books instead of his itouch at rest stops. He polished off his assigned book and almost finished a new Alex Ryder mystery. Not surprisingly, it has been a real drag to get him to do his journal and even more so math. Granted we did not have a nice neat math packet for him like we did for the girls so it was more a question of fiddling about trying to find fun, grade appropriate math sites on the Internet but it was not like he was falling over himself to participate. Hopefully with Singapore math we’ll be carrying around what we need and he can go thru the workbooks one lesson at a time.

So far the girls have been fantastic about doing their homework, writing pages in their journals and working through the math packet their teachers gave them. I have even had time to read to them at bedtime (the kindle is a definite keeper for the big trip!). So the only thing they are not doing is reading on their own but I assume they will pick that up more as we travel. They all definitely had a good dose of science from the very hands on, interactive exhibits at both the Science museum and Natural History museum in London, not to mention all the astrology programs they did at the Observatory in Greenich. David Evan especially had a blast setting up the equipment needed for various space exploration expeditions, deciding which specific items were needed and making sure the weight balance was maintained (or else the rocket ship blew up on re-entry!). There was a wonderful table with stars floating across it and if you captured a star with a cone it would immediately tell you something interesting about black holes, nebulas, the birth or death of stars, etc., which the girls loved. All in all we were very impressed with the museums in London! In Ireland we went to Dublinia in Dublin and King John’s Castle in Limerick which were interactive in a completely different way – being able to put on 14th c peasant clothing or hold a Viking battle-ax or simply walk along the battlements of a 12th c castle (or put your sister in the stockade).

We’ve actually pulled together on the fly a kind of school kit that hopefully will be all we need – mechanical pencils, pens, colored pencils, small eraser, sharpener, glue stick, scissors, math dice, ruler, tiny stapler and staples. We will need to bring both lined journals and ones for drawing

We didn’t forget anything earth shattering tho we didn’t bring water bottles which I think we should do on the big trip and we will have to work out day packs for the kids. They definitely need better ones than the ones they have now. Mine, however, worked out much better than I expected. Most importantly, not only did nobody kill anybody, DE and the girls really, really got along and cooperated and that is more reassuring than finding out we could cope without credit cards for two weeks!

It is amazing to me how devil-may-care I was the first time I went off on a trip around the world. I temped in an office for a few months, made about $2,000, went to a tiny little hole in the wall bucket shop and bought a RTW ticket and got on a plane.

And. That. Was. It.

Now, I’m sorting out visas, packing up houses, booking vaccinations around baseball games, and filing leave of absence forms from formal schooling. What kills me however is the tiny little things that trip you up.

I had found out that one of the requirements for homeschooling is a standardized test in 3nd grade. Well, it just so happens my girls will be missing third grade. So I thought, let’s get ahead of the program and take the test before we leave rather than that being the first welcome back after our year away. So I found out which tests were acceptable and how they were administered. I found out some could be administered by the parent themselves so long as the parent had a college degree. Great, no problem, until I tried to actually register and discovered I had to PROVE I had a B.A. by sending the testing center a copy of my degree. Now I don’t know about you but I did not frame the dang thing and hang it in my bathroom. In fact the last time I saw said sheepskin was when it was pressed into my hand 30 odd years ago. So far, everyone has just pretty much believed me when I wrote it on my resume. But I think, no problem, I’ll just call my old college and have them send me a new one. Hah! Seems you have to jump thru a few hoops first, sending in “letters of inquiry” and filling out affidavits and “signed consent forms” ( and paying fees) and you still don’t get an actual copy, just a piece of paper on “official” stationary saying this person did in fact go to this bloody stupid school. I lost strength just on the first go round. Maybe I can gear up again in a few days. Or maybe we will find out what happens to kids who arrive in 4th grade without ever having taken the bloody stupid 3nd grade test.

Then this week I thought, well, we have a little time to kill, lets get the vaccinations over with. I knew some of them take three doses and over a month to finish. I also knew from checking with my kids’ pediatrician that she could give the rabies vaccination (and thus save $1,000s of dollars since it would be covered by insurance) but she couldn’t give the yellow fever ones. Those could only be given by licensed travel clinics. So I call her up to say, let’s get started on those rabies shots and her secretary says sure, they will give me a prescription to take to the pharmacy to get filled. Huh? They don’t actually have the vaccine, they will just administer it. So I call the pharmacy to say, I have this prescription for a vaccination against rabies, can you fill it?and actually, no, they cannot and neither can any other of the big pharmacies around town. Well, That’s a quandary. OK I thought, let me check with the Travel Clinic after all and that’s fine they have plenty of that vaccine and all the others. So great, but when I tell them the age of my kids they say, oh no, we are not allowed to give shots to anyone under 18. So my ped can give the shot to my kids but doesn’t have the actual stuff and the clinic has the actual stuff but can’t give it to my kids. Sigh….

This is what my days are filled with now…

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